On Dec 24, 2009, at 12:02 PM, Roger E. Rustad, Jr. wrote: > On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 10:48 AM, Jeff Lasman <jpli...@nobaloney.net> wrote: >> And for what it's worth, that $15/month fee from Red Hat doesn't include any >> support; it's strictly a fee for us to be able to tell people we use Red Hat >> (when i last spoke with a Rep [a long time ago]) he said he didn't even care >> if I used the CentOS ISO, as long as I paid for the right to call it Red Hat. >> While I doubt that's official company policy (and it's not what I do), it's >> an >> interesting. > > Interesting... > > I've heard conflicting things about CentOS and Red Hat. Someone told > me that you could use CentOS and that Red Hat would support it if you > paid their fee. I posed that question on a listserv, and I got shot > down, yet I read posts like yours that say that it's all about just > paying your money. > > Bottom line, I would like to use CentOS for certain server-related > stuff, but would also like to budget in a yearly fee for when I need > to call someone for assistance.
So CentOS is supposed to be 100% binary compatible with RedHat. The only difference being the RedHat specific portions such as /etc/redhat-release and other specifically RedHat files. Those files I believe are copyrighted / trademarked etc specifically by RedHat and can not be distributed by anyone other than RedHat. A very similar procedure to that when dealing with Mozilla Firefox or debian built firefox, where in order to claim "Mozilla Firefox" with the logos etc you have to meet specific criteria. I know a common practice is to have a specific small number of RedHat licenses used for pre-production testing, vendor certification and direct troubleshooting and then using CentOS as the primary production environment. If your vendor tool requires RedHat 5.1, you run CentOS 5.1 in production. If uptime/support is required you buy a small percentage of RHEL licenses that allow you to fall back on RHEL 5 while you obtain vendor / RedHat support for the issue. This reduces the occurances of "your not using a supported OS non-support calls" and various other finger pointing rat holes. If you support tens through thousands of machines that are used strictly for simulations this is a huge financial win in most cases. - Brian _______________________________________________ LinuxUsers mailing list LinuxUsers@socallinux.org http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
